Today's NYT Personal Health column describes "a promising approach to delivering better health care: the so-called medical home." In summary, a primary care physician oversees a team of healthcare professionals to provide round-the-clock access to care.
We've been talking about this concept lately on this blog (see The Medical Home and If All Doctors had Time To Listen). Today, I'll focus on the teamwork aspect of this approach to care.
The key benefits of a Medical Home are "coordinated care that emphasizes wellness rather than a fragmented, difficult-to-navigate system based on costly acute care."
This notion is realistic, as long as physicians are available to fill the role of coordinator. And that will happen only if physicians receive reasonable remuneration for their services to staunch the flight of physicians-in-training from primary care specialties.
I chose internal medicine as my specialty precisely because it required I think about and care about the patient as a whole. I enjoyed being the coordinator of my patients' care. And, yes, it took a lot of time.
I've seen social movements before, with their clashes of idealism and practicality. Today's column makes me hopeful. When patients, clinicians, academics, politicians and number-crunchers focus on teamwork, we are all better off. On a winning team everyone is in on the game plan.
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